[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 18]
[House]
[Pages 24899-24900]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




           HURRICANE WILMA VICTIMS NEED HELP IN SOUTH FLORIDA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Wasserman Schultz) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Ms. WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. Mr. Speaker, this afternoon all across south 
Florida, there are thousands of

[[Page 24900]]

people whose homes have been condemned. They have been condemned 
following a category 3 hurricane called Hurricane Wilma.
  Subsequently in the last few days, it has been pouring rain. I went 
door to door in my district over the weekend and met hundreds of men 
and women in their 80s and 90s stuck in their apartments with no power. 
At one point, I came upon a 93-year-old women in her kitchen with her 
90-year-old next-door neighbor who were looking with despair at an MRE, 
trying to figure out how to get it open, put it together, and get it 
heating so that they could have the first hot food, something 
resembling hot food, that they had had in 5 days.
  I literally had to help them with the print on the instructions that 
was this big, try to figure out how to put that meal together without 
burning themselves, because as soon as you put the water in the meal, 
it starts to immediately heat up.
  This was not an isolated incident. In the 2 days after that, those 
women and the other senior citizens that I represent in the Sunrise 
Lakes Condominium were told that they needed to leave their apartments 
because after the rain, the leaking through their condominium roof was 
so bad that their apartments were uninhabitable.
  They are now in an elementary school with no shower, with a makeshift 
shower that was put together with two porta-potties shoved next to each 
other and plastic sheeting taped up with a hose stuck over the top so 
that they could bathe. We are talking about men and women in their 
upper 80s and 90s.
  Hurricane Wilma has caused tremendous suffering in south Florida, and 
there has not been enough national attention on the plight of my 
constituents and the constituents of my south Florida colleagues. We 
need to make sure that we are able to provide the help and assistance 
that they so desperately need.
  There is need across this country, and next week we are going to add 
insult to injury and apply a manmade disaster in the form of the budget 
reconciliation, which is Washington-speak for budget cuts. There are 
going to be proposed housing cuts, Medicare cuts, food stamps, school 
lunches. Between Katrina and Wilma, and all of the suffering going on 
across this country, now is not the time to add more harm and do more 
damage to people who are badly in need.
  Mr. Speaker, we need to do right by Americans, not pull the rug out 
from under them. I urge my colleagues to make sure that we provide the 
badly needed assistance, both to victims of Hurricane Katrina on the 
gulf coast and to victims of Katrina from south Florida.

                          ____________________